Why Illinois (still) needs redistricting reform

Illinois voters will not get the chance to approve or reject a new process for drawing electoral districts this fall. Hundreds of thousands signed petitions to put a constitutional amendment revising that process onto the November ballot, but in June a state court ruled that the proposed amendment did not meet the state's extremely tight standards for permissible direct democracy. The state is not due to redraw state legislative and congressional districts until after the 2020 census, so reformers have a few more years to try again, if they can muster the enthusiasm.

Is there a pressing need to revise our redistricting process? Is the current system really so bad?

Absolutely.

First, the process is flawed in an obvious way: There is too little transparency and too few people are involved. In turn, polls show that the public distrusts the results. Most don't know exactly what purposes are served by the peculiarly shaped districts, but they rightly guess that twisty lines betray that someone is somehow cheating.

What of the election outcomes under the current system? Consider the congressional map. In the 190 U.S. House races in Illinois run under the prior (2001) map, only 11 contests were competitive (i.e., had a margin of victory less than 10 percentage points). In 2012, the new maps drawn in 2011 saw five out of 18 races in that range. And with weeks to go before the 2014 election, it looks like as many as four races might be close this time. That's far from robust competition, but it is an improvement on the recent past, and it is not bad in comparison with many states. So what's the problem?

INCUMBENT PROTECTION

Competition is welcome — and even more close races would be nice — but competitiveness is not the only criterion for a good and fair map. The 2002-10 congressional map essentially was a bipartisan “incumbent protection” gerrymander, drawn to assist officeholders from both parties. And it mainly succeeded, producing little incumbent or even party turnover until the very end of the decade. The new map, by contrast, was crafted by Democrats to increase the number of Democratic seats. And it also worked well, as Illinois' GOP congressional delegation was cut in half in 2012.

The key to successful partisan gerrymandering is to concentrate the other party's voters in relatively few thoroughly safe districts so that the party “wastes” lots of votes. But that strategy is somewhat risky, since the gerrymandering party wins the most seats when it creates many districts its candidates expect to win by comparatively small margins. If the mapmakers underestimate future partisan tides, this strategy can backfire.

In effect, partisan gerrymanders can create more suspense, volatility and competition than incumbent-protecting gerrymanders, but they are, nonetheless, very deliberately skewed to treat the parties (and their supporters) differently. Do not mistake a few more narrow wins for a neutral playing field. The current congressional map was manipulated to affect election outcomes every bit as much as was the previous one. The only difference is that rather than help incumbents, the current one helps Democrats.

Therein lies the problem. The public is not well-served by maps that engineer outcomes, skewing or dampening responsiveness to mass preferences. Whether rigged to help incumbents or to help one major party and harm the other, unfair maps mar democracy. The current Illinois redistricting process has a clear record of producing maps that were plainly drawn not to be fair, albeit in distinct ways. A new, better process should remain a top priority for anyone serious about improving the state's sour political culture.